Red Hat Celebrates 25th Anniversary with a New Code Portal

The company announces a GitHub page with links to source code for all its projects

Red Hat was founded in 1993, two years after Linus Torvalds announced the Linux kernel. The company just celebrated its 25th anniversary in March 2018.

Red Hat was co-founded by Bob Young as ACC Corporation to sell Linux and Unix accessories. One year later, Marc Ewing created a Linux distribution called Red Hat Linux. Later, Young acquired Ewing’s business and created what we know as Red Hat today.

Red Hat pioneered a business model around Linux and Open Source as it moved away from selling coffee mugs and merchandise and started a subscription-based business model. The company went public in 1999 and, fast forward to 2018, Red Hat reported revenue of ~ $3 billion in 2017.

Celebrating its anniversary in a pure open source manner, Red Hat announced a brand new GitHub page to host the source code of all of its projects. “The page will try to list every known free and open source project hosted on GitHub in which Red Hat staffers directly participate as part of their work,” Red Hat community analyst Brian Proffitt writes in a blog post.